Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie, I review the various print options you have available for printing frames and pages in Flash CS3 Professional. You'll want to do this to preview and edit your documents. You can specify frames to be printable also from the Flash Player by a viewer, when printing frames from the Flash FLA document use the print dialog box here in the upper left hand corner. File, print, to specify the range of scenes or frames to print and the number of copies. In windows you also have a page set up dialog under file, page set up right here. You can use this dialog box to specify paper size, orientation, and various print options including margin settings and whether all the frames are to be printed for each page. Notice that under layout here you have frames, first frame only or all frames. Layout actual size or fit on one page, storyboard boxes, storyboard grid, storyboard blank. This is another one of those dialogs where it's probably best just to experiment with these different settings. On the Macintosh these options are divided between the page set up and the print margins dialog boxes. Now it's also possible to use ActionScript 2.0 or ActionScript 3.0 to add printing functionality to Flash documents that let users print from the Flash player. You can use the ActionScript print job class or you can use the print or print as bitmap ActionScript functions. Users can also access the Flash player context menu and select the print command there. I have an example, open here, here's my shockwave player, and notice that under file print, there are some options here that let the user specify the printer, preferences on the printer, number of copies. Pretty limited but there some options here. Additionally users can print from browser rather then from the Flash player so here's the same file in my browser, firefox. They'll select a command such as file, print from the main menu. Here notice you have some options for how they want to print the content. However printing from the Flash player directly rather then from a browser window offers several advantages including users can print all the frames or certain frames that you've labeled as printable from the Flash player. I'll show you that in a minute. Additionally you can set the print area of a frame second if you choose to print from the Flash player you can specify that content print as vector graphics. Take advantage of higher resolution or as bitmaps to preserve transparency and color effects. The ActionScript print job object improves upon the print and print as bitmap functions by adding the ability to print dynamically rendered pages as a single print job. The print job object also provides the users printer settings which can be used to format reports specifically for that user. I should point out that in the Flash documentation it states that Flash player versions earlier then 4.0 or 4.020 on the Macintosh do not support printing frames directly. Flash player 7 and later supports the print job class. Now I mentioned earlier that if you enable printing from the Flash player, let me close the browser here and bring up my Flash player again by choosing file, print, that every frame in the movie will be printed. However you can restrict printing to certain key frames only by labeling them as printable from the FLA source file. Let me demonstrate how to do that with my source file here. Let's open up my timeline and let's say that I wanted to print frames 10 and 15, just go ahead and insert a blank key frame there, open up my properties inspector and in order to print that frame only just put in the frame label pound sign, lowercase P, it must be a lowercase P, so that'll print out that frame. Go to frame 15, repeat that procedure, add a key frame and then add another label, pound sign, lowercase P and let's print one more. Let's print frame 20, insert blank key frame, in this label layer notice I'm adding all my labels there. Which is very handy to do. So go back and open up my properties inspector again and in the frame label there in the property inspector, pound sign, lowercase P. Let me give you one more tip, to make the print menu and all the other options available in that Flash player, you need to set the playback options in the HTML tab of the publish settings dialog to display menu. Let's bring that up again and let me show you where that is. In the HTML tab there's an option, display menu without that checked, the user will not get that contextual menu where they can print from the Flash player. Now to disable all printing from the Flash player, let's say you don't want your audience to be able to print anything from that Flash player you can select any key frame in your timeline and simple label it with a exclamation point, pound sign and then lowercase P and that will disable all printing from that Flash player. Now notice if I go ahead and publish this file with my exclamation point, pound sign P I get an error saying that there are two labels of the same name there. Pound sign P, but now if I go and play my SWF file, publishing, notice that right here the print option is disabled so the user cannot print at all from this SWF file that I just published. And that will conclude this section of the tutorial on publishing and exporting content from Flash CS3 Professional. That also concludes all the content that I will be presenting in this tutorial, let me move on now to the next section and wrap up this tutorial on Flash CS3 Professional with the course wrap up on all you've learned and a little bit about your author.